Retro Gaming Australia

It was a heartbreaking moment for RPG fans last generation when the plug was pulled on official translation plans for the SEGA AGES releases of Phantasy Star: Generation 1 and Phantasy Star: Generation 2 on the PlayStation 2. The remakes were considered to be the only good thing to come out of the SEGA AGES project under the 3D AGES venture.

Thanks to the hard work of a young lady by the name of Kyence, you can now enjoy Phantasy Star: Generation 1 on the PlayStation 2 in English (on a modded system or emulator, at least).

Two versions of the patch are available – one using the Japanese character names, and one using the English character names. You can get the patches here.

Kyence plans to tackle Phantasy Star: Generation 2 next.

The Sega AGES 2500 series was an interesting experiment early last decade. It started out with D3 and Sega teaming up to produce 3D remakes of classic Sega franchises like Phantasy Star, Golden Axe and Space Harrier and selling them for 2500 yen. However, after some of these remakes turned out to be terrible, Sega teamed up with M2 to produce highly accurate ports of their other popular games like Virtua Fighter 2, Gunstar Heroes and Fantasy Zone.

Today the company announced that some of these games will be coming to the Japanese PlayStation Network as part of the PS2 Classics line up. First game up is the Saturn classic Dragon Force. It will be followed by the STV brawler Dynamite Deka (or Die Hard Arcade) and Gunstar Heroes: Treasure Box

Sega’s embrace of digital distribution appears to be paying dividends – at least for Japan.